"The phrase 'there's an app for that' just doesn't scale anymore," said Charlie Wood, a Numerous co-founder, noting that everybody's phone has too many apps already. These multifunction apps aim to replace all those other choices. The app allows one to check weather forecasts, stock quotes, bank balances, Facebook followers and your company's Google Analytics trends all in the same place. Each can be shared with a different set of people.
Other competing apps include Human and Gyroscope for personal data, along with Domo and Geckoboard for business. Human automatically creates a website based on your personal movement data. Gyroscope tracks and shares the active locations of millions of people globally, showing where everybody is at the same time.
The key factor in all this is keeping your data safe, and only sharing it with the groups you want. You don't want your internal business sales numbers accidentally sent out to the public. And then there is hacking. If one app has all your data, it's just that easy to get it.
Experts don't see a company like Apple trying to come and compete in this space, because it makes too much money selling individual apps one by one.
In the case of Numerous, the app just passed 90,000 users this week, and you can see how that growth has blown up in the past several days, once the app was relaunched and featured by Apple.
